


Brief And Shining Moments

by Laine



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin
Genre: F/M, Future Fic, Kink Meme, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-17
Updated: 2012-04-17
Packaged: 2017-11-03 20:04:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/385401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Laine/pseuds/Laine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They both believed in songs once.</p>
<p>This was written for <a href="http://workswithwords.livejournal.com/259929.html">You Win Or You Die: A Game of Thrones Kink Meme</a>.    The prompt was:  Jaime/Sansa; licking away tears.  Jaime tells Sansa that all of his hopes and dreams of knighthood and romance were dashed when Rhaegar and Arthur Dayne died.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Brief And Shining Moments

 

 

Jaime is not a reticent man by nature; Sansa’s seen evidence to the contrary in the way he banters with Brienne and exchanges bawdy tales with Pod and Hyle Hunt.  And yet, when his time comes to guard her tent, he’ll sit in sullen silence, his one good hand toying with the fastenings of his scabbard, green eyes downcast.  
  
She feels lonelier with him in the room than when she actually is by herself.  His dour presence creates a void, and she’s spent too much time alone already...  
  
Her time in the Vale honed her natural skill for conversation; in spite of Randa’s boisterous manners, many of her kinsmen were the quiet sort, and Alayne learned quickly how to ask the correct questions and get them talking.    
  
She tries the trick on Jaime Lannister- just easy queries here and there, nothing jarring or contentious.  And before she knows it, he’s moved his chair near her cot and begun to recount his early days in the Kingsguard, his adventures with Ser Gerold and Ser Barristan.  But most of all, he speaks of the Sword of the Morning.  Most of all, he speaks of Arthur Dayne.  
  
(Light returns to his eyes when he pronounces the three syllables- “Ser Arthur, Ser Arthur”- and Sansa finds that she likes him this way, excited and animated and alive.  He looks so much younger when he smiles- she steels her mind against his resemblance to Joffrey, for those thoughts, those memories have no use here.)  
  
The Daynes of Starfall- a memory springs unbidden into Sansa’s mind, a question she’d asked her father years ago.  She’d overheard something curious in the kitchens, and she approached Ned Stark in his solar later that day, child’s eyes wide and inquisitive.  “Father, who is Ashara Dayne?”  Her father had fixed her with a serious stare and asked her where she heard that name.  He bade her never speak of it again, appeasing her curiosity with only:  “A girl from the South.  A girl who died.”  
  
She nearly surprises herself, asking Jaime to tell her of Ashara Dayne.  But she’s bold on the wine (a poor vintage that tastes of the leather of Jaime’s flagon)- he twists his lips and looks away from her.  
  
“Ashara, the fallen star.  It’s a pretty story, isn’t it?  Heartbreak, tragedy, suicide- a dream come true for the minstrels.”  
  
Resentment clings to every word, and Sansa silently chastises herself. _Petyr would call this entire conversation inappropriate- ‘Poor drinking talk, Alayne’-_  
  
Jaime draws his shoulders inward.   He keeps speaking, but she must strain to hear.  “They lit up the court, Arthur and Ashara.  She’d always enter the Great Hall on his arm, they’d always dance together at the feasts.   When he’d win a tourney, he never thought of crowning any other girl the Queen of Love and Beauty.  Only Ashara, always.  And they were so alike, but for the color of their hair-”  He pauses to swallow, and Sansa finds herself transfixed by the laborious movement of his throat.    
  
When he continues, it is nearly in a whisper.  “I thought that perhaps...that they might be like us.  It excited me, the thought that Arthur might understand...but when I tried to ask him what was between him and his sister, he looked at me as if I’d sprouted another head.  Because of course, Arthur Dayne would never break his vows, especially not with his own blood- no man had honor like his.”  
  
Nausea seeps into her stomach at the reminder of the secret that had cost her father his life, but she holds it down.  
  
Emerald eyes flicker over to her, dark and piercing.  “They were a pretty pair, a pretty story.  Do you still care for pretty stories, my lady?”  
  
A plethora of scripted answers rise in her throat, but she only shrugs.    
  
“You’d have liked King’s Landing at that time, then.  It dazzled me, to be sure- the Kingsguard was quite something back then, not the pathetic group of glorified sellswords that it is today.  And Prince Rhaegar was everything I thought a king should be, brave and beautiful and kind-”  He gestures with his free hand, and the flagon of wine spills onto Sansa’s skirt.  But Jaime scarcely even notices.  
  
“Summer, my lady.  Not in truth, but as I remember it- all balmy days and clear skies.  Just a brief and shining moment...but it couldn’t stay.  Aerys Targaryen saw to that.”  She watches his shoulders move up and down, breath quickening.    
  
“And then when Robert came and took the city and took my sister to wife, everyone called it the start of a golden age, the end of the Targaryen legacy.  But there was too much blood already, too much viciousness and murder...summer was over for all of us, and winter came in earnest for Arthur.”  His jaw grows tight, and he looks away from her again.  “Aye, and for Ashara, too.”  
  
The candlelight illuminates the side of his face, and she is startled to see a trickling of moisture trailing down his cheek and disappearing into his beard.  Abruptly, Jaime stands from the chair and bows his head low, obscuring his face from her view.  “I’ll stand guard outside the tent, my lady,” he murmurs, unable to conceal the thickness in his throat.  
  
Ordinarily, Sansa resents tears from men- _tears are a woman’s weapon, aren’t they?  And we have so few as it is..._ But from Jaime Lannister the Kingslayer, her unlikely friend and, surprisingly enough, a fellow dreamer....she reaches out and closes her hand around his wrist.  
  
“Jaime.”  He blinks at her- she’d never called him aught but “Ser” before.  His eyes are red and still moist, and he tries to turn away, but she pulls with great insistence, pulls until he sits back down in his chair.  And then she takes his face between her palms, stroking her thumbs over the dampened beard.  “I’m...”  She realizes that, for all of her training, for all of her manufactured poise, she hasn’t the slightest idea what to say in this situation.  “I’m sorry.”  
  
“For what?” he nearly spits.  “Perhaps it’s better to live in dark times- dreams destroy as much as anything else.  I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that.”    
  
Her nails dig into the skin of his face, just a little, and he winces.  But then his lips curve into a strange smile as he lifts his left hand and carefully, delicately, traces the slope of her cheek.  
  
“Do you want to hear something absurd?” he asks, and when she nods, he places more pressure in the finger, bringing it down to rest on her lower lip.    
  
“I thought that you might be the last song left.”  
  
Suddenly, Sansa feels the air leaving her body, a storm of rage and sadness and indignation swirling at her core.   _Well, I’m sorry, Ser Kingslayer.  I’m sorry that I’m not the pristine maiden, waiting in a white tower to be saved.  I’m sorry you couldn’t ride up on a white stallion with your two hands to save me.  I’m sorry that I’m ruined, spoiled, impure-_  
  
Her little hands clutch at his hair, and she’s sure that the facade has slipped; she can see her blazing eyes reflected in Jaime’s.    
  
She can see her reflection so clearly because the mist of tears has not yet abated.  He keeps his thumb on her lips, and they hold still for a moment, until Sansa whispers-  
  
“I gave my last song away years ago.  These are dark times, as you say.  We can’t hold with songs anymore.”  
  
There is a waver in her voice- true as they are, it costs her to speak these words aloud.  A shine in Jaime’s eyes tells her that he knows it- _ Gods, he was as big a fool as I once.   Dreamers...  
_   
They see each other for what they are- reconstructions, works in progress, pretty facades broken and stripped down and striving to become something new.  When she kisses him with urgent lips and a pleading tongue, he accepts, breathing his shattered fancies into hers- _we’ll let them go together, we’ll learn to love how dead we are._  
  
He’s far from the most skilled lover she’s had- he lacks both Petyr’s patience and Harry’s practice.  Petyr’s touches never hurt; he was far too deliberate and precise.  Harry would grab too tight and thrust too hard on occasion, but she’d always receive a litany of apologies afterward.  
  
When Jaime hits the side of her head with the golden hand, hard enough to raise a welt, he offers no spoken apology.  But he brings his lips to the spot at once, kissing and gentling until she sighs and forgets the pain.  He is not sleek and slender like Petyr, nor is he towering and hulking like Harry.  Just narrow hips and broad shoulders, the muscled arms and legs of a soldier.  He is beautiful still, and Sansa finds a perverse pleasure when she thinks of his stories of riding beside Arthur Dayne, both tall and proud and golden-headed, eyes of emerald and amethyst transfixing every girl at court- glorious and unattainable.  She herself has had more lovers than Jaime Lannister- she tries to keep the shame of that thought away- and although she hates to think of the other woman she shares him with, she likes the idea of his _newness_ , of him as the pristine one.    
  
She runs her tongue over the line of his jaw and down his neck, tasting the salt of sweat and tears.  When he whispers her name into her ear before biting down on the lobe, she whimpers, legs tight around his waist.    
  
“Jaime, please...” She sounds wanton, but they aren’t playing at maidens and knights, not anymore.  Her hand dips down to stroke his cock- not like Petyr’s, not like Harry’s- and he pants as he mouths the skin of her throat.    
  
He slides into her easily- she’s slick with want, and she’s pleased to hear him groan as he begins to thrust.  They move together in a clumsy, frantic tangle of limbs, mouths everywhere and foreheads colliding.   _Petyr would be horrified_ \- he’d schooled her so carefully in the art of lovemaking, and she’d played the part to perfection with Harry, every movement precise nearly to the point of choreography.    
  
Nothing with Jaime could be described as precise- he slips out of her a few times, they elbow each other, he bites down on her lip hard enough to split it in two.  Her nails claw at his back, leaving pinpricks of blood on his tunic- even in the dim light, she can see purple splotches forming on her white bosom.  But they’re so tight together, joined in shared desperation, and she screams her release as she never did with Petyr or Harry, so loud that she’s sure Brienne and Hyle must hear it, even half-a-mile away.    
  
They lie twisted together, damp and glistening, chests heaving and heartbeats quick.  He still idly strokes her breast, and she feels a twinge of excitement- he’ll be hard again soon enough, and then they’ll go, fucking the reality into each other as many times as they can do it.    
  
But as she waits, Sansa finds herself thinking of songs.  Not the pretty story-songs of the South, but the old music of the North.  She’d hated it as a child, sharing her mother’s distaste for the harsh, immediate rhythms.  And the melodies- jarring, discordant, assailing the ears with notes too high and too low.  There was nothing beautiful in it at all- and yet the power could not be denied.  These were songs to move mountains, songs to bring armies to their knees, songs of conquest and possession, of war and darkness, of the lust of battle and the dream of victory.  
  
As Sansa nestles closer to her fellow warrior, she smiles at the thought that, even in the dark days to come, there may still be a place for songs.

 

  



End file.
